Google Puts $100M into Shepherds Flat Wind Farm

Google invests $100 million in the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm, the largest of its kind in the United States, bringing Google's clean energy spend to $350 million.

Google
upped its total clean energy spend to $350 million after pumping $100 million
into the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm April 18.
Spanning
over 30 square miles in Arlington, Ore., Shepherds Flat is expected to cost $2
billion to build and should produce 845 megawatts of electricity, or enough to
fuel more than 235,000 homes, when it is completed by developer Caithness
Energy in 2012.

That
would make it the largest wind farm in the world, said Rick Needham, Google's
director of Green Business Operations, in a blog post.

Clean
or renewable energy includes hydroelectricity, solar energy, wind energy, wave
power, geothermal energy, bioenergy and tidal power.
Google,
a massive consumer of energy to power the thousands of computers that fuel its
search and Web services, has pumped more than $350 million into clean energy,
coming mostly in wind and/or tidal energy.
Google
last October invested in the Atlantic
Wind Connection backbone to power offshore windmills by connecting undersea
cables along the Atlantic coast. Google last May seeded two NextEra wind farms
in North Dakota with $38.8 million.
The
Shepherds Flat development, easily Google's biggest wind power fund to date, is
the first commercial wind farm in the United States to leverage turbines that
use permanent magnet generators to boost the efficiency of wind power
generation. Such generators are also called alternatives because they generate
alternating current.
General
Electric, a co-investor in Shepherds Flat along with Google, Japan's Sumitomo
Corp. and a unit of Itochu, manufactured the turbines and is the operations and
maintenance supplier.
The
electricity produced at Shepherds Flat will be sold under long-term agreements
to Southern California Edison. This will help Google endear itself to its home
state of California, as Needham said the project will help California meet its
renewable energy goals.
Google's
funding for Shepherds Flat comes less than a week after the company invested
$168 million for Brightsource's Ivanpah solar power tower in the Mojave Desert
and $5 million for a solar photovoltaic
plant near Berlin.